“Does anyone of You sell or keep those-say sixpences and come to the landowner to give him the 50% of it? Well- I dont….. I cant imagine myself giving say £12.50 (50% value) (if I had a good day detecting) to the person who owns 2000 acres with 1000 dairy cattle….. My farmers will get 50% value of items CLASSED as TREASURE only. Am I doing something wrong here?”

Yes Sado, you are. The objects are 100% his not yours so if he hasn’t agreed then it’s theft. Think of it as nighthawking but far worse as there are far more of you than them. Your inconsequential £25 a week (100% value) could be £1200 a year and if just 3,000 detectorists do the same as you that’s an inconsequential £3.6 million being stolen from farmers by legal detectorists annually. Now, what was it you were saying about nighthawks giving detecting a bad name?

9 comments

Dislike: why would a robber landowner that owns more than his natural share of land (roughly 2 Ha, incl. deserts for current World population estimates) have any moral (notice I don’t say legal, I don’t care about that) right to any profit for a job he/she has not performed.

This, as you put it, is not about the collective (public, state, cultural institutions) share of the findings, which I deem most important but about a vampire getting “his legal share” of blood on the work of others just because his ancestors were warrying jerks on a horse.

Even though we have less than two hectares of land, I would still strongly object to Maju or Sado or anyone else feeling they had a ‘moral’ right to come on that land and take away anything they found that I or my relatives or predecessors had dropped or in any way deposited there. That’s stealing, however you may look at it.

I don’t see it that way: they way you produce the argument is that he/she is the owner, what seems to be all your argument (and also the argument of the cheater detectorist, just that in reverse). Unlike in other criticisms of detectorism in this blog, where public interest is the issue at hand (and I support those), here the only argument is private property and hence private property and the unfairness of its existance, especially at abusive levels is where the debate belongs.

The official stance of this blog is property neutral! So although our main theme about detecting is to complain about the way in which it damages the public interest, that doesn’t mean we don’t think a lot of farmers get ripped off. They certainly do and the occasional article pointing it out is justified as the Government, PAS and the archaeological Establishment don’t warn them about it.

I find this non-neutral but ideologically motivated. Why would an absentist landowner deserve anything but disdain and the occasional cheat like this one? I can’t but side with the detectorist on this matter.

Well it’s pretty clear the detectorist was justifying his own behaviour by postulating a very rich landowner and you in turn are suggesting an absentee landowner who had inherited wealth.
Truth is though, most landowners are ordinary people who don’t deserve to be cheated.

And you seem to be justifying your dismissal by imagining the opposite. Not long ago the British fought a civil rights struggle just to be able to walk through the public ways that cross the vast properties of absentee “farmer” aristocracy. At least by fame Britain is one of the countries with most concentration of land of all Europe, as no land reform was ever made but in the sense of concentrating all lands in few hands (enclosures).

I’ve been making a small online research and the best I could find on land ownership in Britain is this report by the Labor Research Department, where it is said:

1. That the structure of land property in Britain is ill-known because the government collects the data but keeps it hidden.

2. That the last such publicly available census is from 1873 and showed more than 80% of land in the hands of aristocrats.

3. However since then the distribution has been leveled quite a bit, according to the estimations of the LRD and now “only” 38% of land appears to belong to aristocrats, while 47% may belong to landed farmers (although I see no clear evidence that it may not have been purchased by non-titled land speculators or other large agrarian croporations, like, say, Monsanto or whatever).

So there are reasons to support either stand, depending on the kind of actual owner of the actual state where the incident happened.

In any case it is most unlikely that the current owner has any more relation with the people who “dropped” those items than the detectorist or whoever else (Calmgrove’s pseudo-moral argument). It’s not like land property has been continuous since the Iron Age or anything, certainly not for commoners.

1. Legally the finds belong to the landowner
2. Morally the knowledge belongs to the community.
3. Neither belongs to the detectorist
4. Most detectorists steal the second and many steal the first as well.